The North Texas Beer and Wine Festival Is This Weekend With a Solid Lineup of Events

This Saturday is the third annual North Texas Beer and Wine Festival at the Irving Convention Center from 2 to 7 p.m. Organizer Darrell Faircloth started this event three years ago, back in the old days when craft beer festivals were unheard of.

Most of the local North Texas brewers will be there, including Cedar Creek, Lakewood, Community, Franconia, Firewheel, Peticolas, Revolver, Four Corners and Rahr. For those of you whose are counting, a total of 16 Texas breweries, more than two dozen U.S. breweries and international labels as well. All of that amounts to hundreds of beers to choose from.

This event will also host a wine contingent: Calais out of Dallas, Cowtown Winery, Landon, a Greenville winery, as well as Lost Oak and Sunset wineries from Burleson to name a few.

But, what might be of most interest to any of you hopheads or novice beer drinkers/brewers, is an interesting lineup of brewer breakout sessions:

• Kelly Harris of Homebrew HQ will have a Brewing 101 workshop at 2:45 and another more advanced class at 5:15.

• John Sims of Four Corners Brewing will hold a class at 3:15.

• Wim Bens, founder and master brewer of Lakewood Brewing, will have a brewers breakout at 4:45.

The specific topics covered by the brewers are TBD, but last year they covered issues like going from homebrewing to opening a brewery, and brewery logistics. Each class will be followed by a Q&A session and there will be homebrewing kids and supplies there to buy should you feel really inspired.

Pre-sale tickets are $30 and include 12 samples of beer or eight wines -- or a combo play of both. If you buy day-of, tickets are $40.

There will also be several beer-inspired chef demos from Grant Morgan of The Ranch at Las Colinas, and Josh Garcia from Velvet Taco, plus live music from The Superkings and Brian "Hash Brown" Calway and Mike Morgan.